Your Actions Have Consequences: 1 Kings 11:14-25

You're listening to The Bible Guys, a podcast where a couple of friends talk about the Bible in fun, in practical ways. Well, here we are for another amazing episode of The Bible Guys. I'm Jeff Forster and this is the amazing Wesley Woods. He's filling in for Chris star Bough today. So welcome Wesley. I'm glad to be here today. It's good to have you, and I bet it's gonna be a good one today. It's gonna be a good one. I mean, we got you here in the house and that's that's fantastic. So Christmas is Yes. All I have to say is Chris Batter watch out. He might lose his job if he's not careful. So today Desiree gave us. A challenge, right, and the challenge is And I think this might be partly because our fan base knows Chris sarbas almost unnatural obsession with movies. You know Zarball pretty well. You can quote lines like just I know. I haven't decided if it's miraculous or if it's some kind. Of like Voodha is doing. I don't know. You can bring back on a lot of lines from Yeah, that's right, that's right. So anyways, we've had a bunch of our show fans ask about our favorite Christmas movies. Okay, and so you're gonna need to conjure your very best bizarre barb. Okay, come up with your favorite Christmas is going to be interesting. Yep, yep, with your favorite Christmas movies? So do you do you want to go first? Do you have a favorite? See, this is where it gets complicated, Jeff, I don't. I didn't grow up with a lot of like favorite Christmas movies. I remember the first time I came to Heritage, which is the church we both go to. Yeah, I came to Heritage and you made a reference to the Christmas story, right, And I was like, Christmas story doesn't mean the story of. Jesus talk about Oh yeah yeah yeah wow. So if I had to pick my number one Christmas movie, it would probably have to be the Charlie Brown one. Oh Charlie Brown Christmas Yeah yeah, yeah, that little sad Christmas Tree with. Brand Yeah, that's a great one. I love that. So when you were a kid, did you you know we did you have cable when your kid? When I was a little little we had TV when I was a teenager, we didn't. Yeah, but so like you had to be there, like on Tuesday nights when they're playing Charlie Brown. Yeah, so there weren't a lot of reruns, right, Yeah, you have to be right. That was exciting, Okay. I think to go as the big throwback. I think my favorite Christmas movie when I was a kid was you remember the stop animation off the Red Nose Rounder. That was my favorite one. Yep, No, that's pretty good. Okay. So for my number two, I would have to say, oh, this is a tough one. You gotta go with the classic Miracle on thirty fourth string. Oh there you go. Wow, you gotta go with the classic Okay, So Miracles, you're into the whole miracle thing. Very good. Well, I think my second favorite is Elf. Okay, I love Elf. I love to me just hysterically funny. I think it's confession live that I've never seen the whole movie. El what what? Okay, I've seen snippets I have seen. So normally I'm the one confessing that I haven't seen movies and zbas horrified, but I think all of our listeners are horrified. I mean, even I've seen EL. Yeah, so I have not seen ELF. I've seen snippets like five minutes here, five minutes yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, okay, okay, well well well we'll accept that answer. What's your number number three? Number two? I think for you? No, this is three three for you. Yeah, this is the third one. Oh okay, yeah. So my third one would be, which I didn't even know until recently, was a Christmas movie. Don't throw rocks at me, audience, but die Hard. All right, well that's a that's going to cause a debate. I mean people have been arguing that one. But it happened at Christmas time and they're playing Christmas music. Yeah, it feels like a Christmas movie. Okay, so made for TV. So okay, I think I like my number. My number three would be How the Grinch. Stole Christmas's Classic? Right, Yeah, yeah, that's the movie. I like the movie better than the better than the cartoon. Yeah, with Jim Carrey. Yep. For the fourth one. Oh man, it's tough. I mean, you got the funny ones like Home Alone kind of, so I might toss that one in there. I love Home Alone. I watched try to watch it every year. Yeah, my my wife always wants to watch, you know, all the movies that make you cry, and I'm always trying to avoid those. Year Ball wouldn't ar Ball would love to just sit there and cry, cry and cry. But that's that's not my deal. So you're not a Hallmark. Try I avoid Hallmark. I try to. I try to get it where it doesn't show up on the screen when you're scrolling. Really so, I would say probably my number four for is uh the Santa Claus. Remember I love Yeah, I loved that one, and that whole franchise is great. But yeah, yeah, okay for my last one, I don't know. It's tough. There's so many good Christmas Ish movies. If I had Oh, so this okay, I'm gonna break the rules a little bit. Okay. The one thing I love doing like this is around Christmas New Year's is the twilight Zone Marathon. Oh really, now it has to be the old Twilight Zone like from the Sterling. Yeah, so I love watching those. They normally have a marathon around Christmas, and I just watch like eighty of them. I had no idea. Yeah yeah, I'm not. Sure that counts Christmas, but it's a marathon. Christmas that's right for you. It's not Christmas without yeah, Twilight. Well, I can't get away with this without saying It's a wonderful life. Yeah, right, so you have to do it. My wife absolutely loves it. She's been asking for the last couple of days because we're coming up on Christmas now, and uh, she's been asking for the last couple of days. Let's watch It's a Wonderful Life. So I'm sure by the time you listen to this, we will have watched it at least once, maybe twice. And I like that. We got to have an honorable mention Scrooge Scrooge. Yes, there you go. Well, there's a ton of good ones. I mean you got national lampoons. Yeah right, Christmas was. It Christmas Vacation? I think so. Yeah, they had like eighty and then and then you had what was the other one? A Christmas Story? Yeah, the one that you mentioned earlier. I remember that one that was being funny reencing. Okay, well, I'm sorry Chris wasn't here to share that one. And but at the same time, we're all horrified that you've never seen alf. You have to go home, You have to go home finish. Yeah, you have to to go home. As a matter of fact, I don't want you to go back to the office after we're done with this. I went to go straight home and watched ELF. What Elf? Okay, Well, we've been lingering here with Solomon for quite some time, and he wrote so many wise sayings in the Book of Proverbs, and we haven't finished them all. We're going to come back and address them again later. Then we pivoted into a little bit of the Song of Solomon, just talking about the romance and all those kinds of things. We didn't finish the Book of Song of Solomon. You can go and finish that if you'd like. It's just a few more chapters. But then we're pivoting into some of his rule, how he ruled. And so Desiree, our amazing assistant, she has moved us on to First King's chapter eleven, and this talks about some of the few enemies that Solomon came up against. So we'll read in First Kings chapter eleven, verse fourteen, it says, then the Lord raised up hey Dad the Edomite, a member of Edom's royal family, to be Solomon's adversary. Years before, David had defeated Edom. Joe Ab, his army commander, had stayed to bury some of the Israelite soldiers who had died in battle, and while there they killed every male in Edom. Joe Ab and the army. Of Israel had stayed there for six months, killing them, but Haydad and a few of his father's royal officials escaped and headed for Egypt. Haydad was just a boy at the time. They set out from Midian and went to paran And where others joined him, and then they traveled to Egypt and went to Pharaoh, who gave them a home, food, and some land. Pharaoh grew very fond of Haydad, and he gave him his wife's sister in marriage, the sister of Queen Tappanese. She bore him a son named I don't know, Jenubath, Yeah yeah. Tapanese raised him in Pharaoh's palace among Pharaoh's own sons. When the news reached Haydad in Egypt that David and his commander Joeab were both dead, he said to Pharaoh, let me return to my own country. Why. Pharaoh asked him, why do you lack? What do you like here that makes you want to go home? Nothing, he replied, But even so, let me return home. And then yep, I got a little bit more. Yep. God also raised up Raison, son of Elieta, as Solomon's adversary, and Raison had fled from his master king had a Deezer of Zoba. What the heck? Why why am I reading all these crazy names? And and he raised up this guy uh and he had become the leader of a gang of rebels. After David conquered headed Deezer, Raison and his men fled to Damascus, where he became King. Raison was Israel's bitter adversary for the rest of Solomon's reign, and he made trouble just as Haydad did. Raison hated Israel intensely and continued to reign in Arim. Well there you go. Yeah, yeah, you handle those names pretty much. That was a rough one, man, So was it. How many letters do you get in your name? Yeah? There should be a limit. There should be a limit how many letters a parent can use to put the kid's name. That is funny. Yeah, well, if we come up to the very beginning, there's something that's super subtle that just kind. Of popped out to me. Okay in verse fifteen, and it's kind of an overarching theme in my mind. At verse fifteen says years before David had defeated Edom, And the thing that popped into my mind is, don't wrestle with something that God has already defeated. Oh wow, And I. Was thinking about that. Don't wrestle with something he's already defeated. Maybe there's someone watching who is dealing with something. Maybe it's an addiction. And the Bible talks about how we should stand in the liberty where with Christ has made us free, So we have freedom and liberty through Christ Jesus. He's already freed us from that. But in conjunction with that, we got to use some common sense. You know, if you had an addiction, maybe there are certain friends you can't hang around anymore. Maybe there are certain things you can't do anymore. Maybe there are certain places that you can't go anymore. So the idea here is, if God has already freed you from this thing, don't go back to the thing and get entangled with it again. Right. That just kind of popped out to me when I read that that years before David had already defeated Edam. Yeah, I think that's really powerful. So Eatam is a country on the southeast side of the Dead Sea, which is now modern day Jordan. And I was there in the land of edom here just recently. And that's not far from Mountain Nebo where Moses died and all those things. And it's a kind of a desolate area, very desert area. And these Edomites fought against Israel over and over and over again until finally, like you said, David subdued him. It's very interesting that they rise up again. They're going to test the sun. All right, we're going to submit to David. He defeated us, but now we're going to come back after And a lot of it is they decimated eat them, they wiped them out right. And so this is really a kind of a grudge kind of a thing where this son who survived that massacre comes back into size. He wants to fight and he can't fight David. David is dead, but he's gonna come after Solomon. Something happens right before this. I kind of wish we'd read verses one through thirteen. We really should have, as a matter of fact, would you mind? Yeah, okay, because this is why all these enemies start to pop up. So let me read verses one through thirteen before we really because over the next day or two we're going to talk about some of Solomon's a few enemies. Yeah, it says in First King's chapter eleven, verse one, it says, now, King Solomon loved many foreign women. Besides Pharaoh's daughter. He married women from Moab, ammon, Edam, Sidon, and from among the Hittites. The Lord had clearly instructed the people of Israel, you must not marry them, because they will turn your hearts to their gods. Yet Solomon insisted on loving them anyway. He had seven hundred wives of royal birth and three hundred concubines, and in fact they did turn his heart away from the Lord. That might be one of the saddest phrases in the Bible, because this is the wisest man that ever lived. Every blessing you can comprehend came from God to him, and his heart turned from me. Because right there, why do you think Solomon, being the wisest person in the world, having all the knowledge that he had, having the relationship he had with God, would turn and pursue the very thing God said don't do. Yeah, you know what. I've been thinking a lot about this idea, not about this topic specifically with Solomon, but just with people. I know. I think a great temptation for wise people, and you know, not everybody's wise, but a great temptation for people who have wisdom is to slip into being clever. Yeah, they replace cleverness for wisdom. And one of the most clever things Solomon did was marry all those wise Politically, it's very clever. He marries all these princesses. They're seven hundred women that were the royal princesses of their tribes or of their nations. And so what happens is now daddy doesn't want to invade. Yeah, you formed alliances. Yeah yeah, And so their dads did not want to invade the and he wound up getting peace through marriage. It's extraordinarily clever. It just happens to be against what God said you do, right, And so. It's it's a temptation. Every great strength has an equal and opposite corresponding deficit. If you're not carving, you to work against those things. And so I think for wisdom, slipping away from the wisest thing and doing the best thing, the wise thing, and trusting that God's going to bless wisdom is to get in and get super. Clever, get a little slick, because you think that you're smarter than everybody else. You know how to finagle and outmaneuver. Yep. And so this is what happens. Then he kind of has all these women as not quite hostages, but he did begin to demand tribute from their fathers. Right now, you need to send me money, yeah, And so I think he looked at that as this is a great way for me now to build my wealth and for me to build my faith and for me. And so this cleverness shifted away from what is best for my nation to what is what's spats for me. And so then the Bible says, in fact, they did turn his heart away from the Lord. It says in Solomon's old age, he turned his heart to worship other gods instead of being completely faithful to the Lord as God, as his father David had been. Salomon worshiped Astorreth, the goddess of the Sidonians, and Molech, the detestable god of the Ammonites. In this way, Solomon did what was evil in the Lord's sight. He refused to follow the Lord completely, as his father David had done. On the Moud of Olives east of Jerusalem. He even built a pagan shrine for Chimoth, the detestable god of Moab, and another for Molek, the detestable god of the Ammonites. Salomon built such shrines for all his foreign wives to use for the burning, for burning incense and sacrificing to their gods. The Lord was very angry with Solomon, for his heart had turned away from the Lord, the God of Israel, who had appeared to him twice. He had warned Solomon specifically about worshiping other gods, but Solomon did not listen to Lord's command. So now the Lord said to him, since you have not kept my covenant and have disobeyed my decrees, I will surely tear the kingdom away from you and give it to one of your servants. But for the sake of your father David, I will not do this while you're still alive. I will take the kingdom away from your son, and even so I will not take away the entire kingdom. I will let him be the king of one tribe. For the sake of my servant David, and for the sake of Jerusalem, I chosen city. Yeah. So then you start to see the enemies start to rise up after that, right, which is the passage we read with all the crazy names. Yeah. Later, So I. Feel like, you know, it's such a sad circumstance that in his old age. Now, the amazing thing is it's not that he left worshiping God and started only worshiping Astarath or Molech or chimash, right, it was that, it says a couple of different times instead of being completely. Faithful, Yeah, I saw that, Yeah, which is. A huge temptation. Isn't it for people to not be completely faithful to God? Yeah? What do you even think about in the area of I think from a and I'm just going to use the word religious perspective of mixing systems. I want to say, so you go to church, but then also maybe there are some new age things that exist and you kind of want to mix God with your lucky whatever thing. Yeah. You see that a lot nowadays. I know people who who they come to church and they pray and they're looking for God's guidance, and then they're also checking their astrological sign to find out what's going to happen today, and am I going to finally get a boyfriend? Right? That kind of stuff. Right, That's exactly what's happening here with Solomon, is there. You know, people are tempted to blend things in you know, very overt ways. In Cuba, for instance, the main religion of Cuba is Santaria, and Santoria is just voodoo with Catholicism stretched over top of it. Right, So they use Catholic words, but they do voodoo religious rituals. And it's not the same. They tried to blend it. This is very. Similar, I think to what Solomon was doing was blending it. But we do it all the time by embracing the way that the world lives, by following the world's philosophies on how we manage relationships or parent or what we put in as our priorities, all these kinds of things. Yeah, yeah, no, I think that's really good. I just think of so many. Areas in the lives of humanity, in humans of how we do that, but just with things across the board. I just think how we try to mix and I think sometimes we try to try to cherry pick the best of each system. And like, if I can cherry pick the best of each system, even though God said don't do that, if I mix it together, it'll all turn out. Okay. Well, it's a crazy kind of because at the beginning, I mean, he actually spoke with God. Yeah, so it's not like he heard from someone who had spoken to God. Right, No, God spoke directly to him. You would be like, dude, don't you understand? Yes, And now often, Jeff, does that happen to us? Yeah, we can read a Bible verse. A Bible verse can say do do not steal. It's plain as day. But you're at work, someone shows you how you can kind of skim off the top. Well, I mean it's okay. I mean I'm going to use it for a good cause. Yeah, yeah, right, that's right. Hey, my boss is a jerk and treats us bad. Anyways, I'm not getting paid. But hey, so you can justify it all kinds of ways. That's right. So this is what you find in Solomon's life is he's trying to blend these these two things, and it's because he disobeyed God on the front end. So marriage is important who we marry is important all the time. I'm recommending especially it seems like young women they're like missionary dating. They are Christians, and they know that their boyfriend's not a Christian, but he's such a nice guy, and whatever whatever, they wind up potential, right, they wind up moving in with him, whatever, they do all these things, and God said, don't do that, don't marry non believers, don't be unequally yoked. It's what the Bible says. It's not like try not to or it's inadvisable. It says, do not right, thou shalt not do that. God is giving a direct command don't marry people who are not believers. And yet there's so many young women that I'll talk to come in and go, oh. I thought he was a nice guy, and I was hoping maybe I could lead him to Jesus. And I got him to. Come to church one time, and so, you know, but then he really wanted me to move in, and we couldn't figure out how to pay rent apart from each other, so we did. And now all of a sudden, oops, you know, and. Just we think we believe God, and we believe him enough to take us to heaven. We don't believe him enough to help us live here on earth. And this is what happens with Solomon is I think he gets too clever and he'd be sides that the pragmatic decision to marry all these women for the safety and security of his people, you had a reason, just like you have a reason. You can't figure out how to pay the rent any other way, so you got to move in with your boyfriend. He had a reason and that is the security of my people is more important than you know. And by the way, I'm a wise person, I'll be able to navigate this ta boat situation, you know. And then next thing, you know, everything that God said would happen happened, and then his family winds up losing the kingdom over it, which is just devastating. It's such a sad moments. It's very interesting to me how Solomon thought he could navigate all of these landmndes. And when you look at just modern day times, you always see people who think that they can navigate through land minds doing like evil things that they probably shouldn't be doing, and they never think they're going to get caught. They never think it's going to catch back up to them. That you know, I'll be the one who will be able to navigate through this. And every single time the Bible says that God is not mocked. Whatever you sew that show you also read, this always catches up with you every single time. So he handled well the pressures of leading his government, but he couldn't handle the pressure from his wives. That isn't that something? Yeah, and hey, that's a very signify thing. So let me read this note. It says Ashtereth was a goddess that symbolized reproductive power, a mistress of the god bail. So basically it was a sexual kind of a religion, right, and this is what they were doing. And then Molek was the national god of the Ammonites, was called detestable because its worship rights also included child sacrifice, which is almost unthinkable. Right. Chimash was the Moabites national god, and he also was declared to be particularly detestable because of their worship. So the Israelites were warned against worshiping all the other gods in general, and Moleq in particular in Exodus and in and so he didn't turn away from God completely, but he began to allow some of these things. Clearly, sex was an issue for him. He's got a thousand wives, right, so it's not surprising that he worshiped at that altar and then sacrificing babies oftentimes was a convenience thing. And then also hoping that. Their life would better, they would sacrifice their baby in order to hope that life would be better. And I look at our nation today and that's always a temptation. Sexuality is extraordinarily important, and people wind up sacrificing their walk with God for temporary intimacy with others. And then I mean, with the sacrifice of babies in our culture being such a significant thing through abortion, it's oftentimes for convenience or because they can't imagine any other way to move forward in their life, like God can't bless them. And those two things have been an issue in human history for thousands upon thousands upon thousands of years. And those two things are the things that pulled Solomon away, just like they pull us away today. And one of the things I love about this passage and the passage you read before, is how relevant the Bible is today as it was, you know, thousands of years ago. And just even the references, so you made those references a moment ago, but the references to places like Damascus, and you know, there's a lot of turmoil going on in Syria right now, and just what the different places the Bible. I think we have to be careful that we don't view it as just a history lesson. But it's the truth, right, that's right, yeah, right, These are real places, rooted in real time with the real people. It's one of the things I love about the Bible is the precision right of it and giving exact places and all those kinds of things, so it's really powerful. Well, I think this is a lesson we're going to get in tomorrow talking about some more of Solomon's enemies and surprise, potential coup, all these kinds of things. So it's a sad kind of ending to what should have been the most glorious and would have been the most globe where is reign ever in Roman in Israel history. So okay, well, thank you. That's we're going to wrap it up right there. Thank you for joining us, and we'll see it tomorrow on the Bible guys. Mhm h